DEVOPSdigest

Pivotal and VMware introduced an enterprise cloud-native stack featuring Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware Photon Platform, combining Pivotal's continuous innovation cloud platform and VMware's cloud-native infrastructure into a single solution to speed application creation and deployment with built-in application and infrastructure management. The two companies originally previewed their joint solution at VMworld 2015 U.S.

Digital transformation is a top priority for enterprises as they look to increase agility in order to compete and innovate more effectively. The Pivotal-VMware cloud-native stack enables enterprises to enhance customer experiences by delivering modern applications that enable business leaders to take advantage of cloud economics, developers to innovate at startup speeds, and operators to run software with greater efficiency. It offers organizations a fast path to building and running their cloud-native applications on-premises.

The Pivotal-VMware cloud-native stack benefits enterprises seeking to deploy cloud-native applications in the following ways:

- Best-in-Class Cloud-Native Stack - VMware Photon Platform is paired with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the industry-leading cloud-native platform, to deliver startup speed with enterprise reliability.

- Simple to Purchase, Install and Maintain - It delivers all the software customers need to quickly deploy and easily manage an enterprise-grade, cloud-ready solution, through a single purchase and support experience.

- Faster Innovation for Developers and Operators - The joint solution is built for speed, scale and programmability, making it usable by developers, operations, and everyone in-between. It is accessible and controllable via APIs, CLI for developers and a GUI for operations teams.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry delivers platform capabilities that enhance developer productivity, enable operational excellence and provide enterprise grade security, scalability, high availability and operational control, so customers can accelerate their time to market for software solutions. Based on open-source technology, Pivotal Cloud Foundry enables customers to innovate faster, and respond to market opportunities with start-up speed and enterprise reliability.

VMware Photon Platform is a new cloud-native infrastructure solution optimized for containers and modern applications. It is purpose-built for use in API-driven, multi-tenant and high-scale environments. Today, the platform consists of VMware Photon Controller, an open sourced distributed control plane, Photon OS, a minimal Linux container host, and VMware ESXi. Over time, the platform will include a new compute host, VMware Photon Machine.

This new cloud-native stack further expands the collaboration between Pivotal and VMware and their aim to help enterprises adopt cloud-native applications. Since 2013, global enterprises have accelerated their application development initiatives successfully running Pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of VMware vSphere. The stack, which is expected to become available in Q2 2016 and feature a single point of support, will help to eliminate the complexity of purchasing, installing and maintaining the software required to run cloud-native applications on-premises.

In March 2016, VMware introduced the Photon Platform BOSH CPI (Cloud Provider Interface) release enabling Cloud Foundry users to deploy and manage applications on Photon Platform without changing their workflow. The CPI is one of several open source components of the solution in addition to Cloud Foundry, Photon Controller, Photon OS and Project Lightwave.

The cloud-native stack from Pivotal and VMware is expected to become available in Q2 2016.